1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and a control apparatus for cooperative cleaning using multiple robots, and more particularly, to a cooperative cleaning method and a cooperative cleaning controller that may monitor an overall cleaning condition of an extensive space and automatically relocate cleaning robots to an area of the space required to be cleaned.
2. Description of the Related Art
To clean an expansive space, for example, an airport, a department store, and an amusement park, a person responsible for cleaning may require a vehicle to traverse the full area. Human involvement in cleaning may be a repetitive and arduous task requiring a high labor cost. Also, the cleaning may be only performed during a predetermined period of time and accordingly, a desired level of cleanliness may not be continuously maintained. A high-capacity cleaning robot for a building, in addition to a home cleaning robot that may automatically perform the cleaning, has been developed. However, a single cleaning robot may not clean a wide area alone, for example, an airport, and thus, multiple cleaning robots may be required. When multiple automatic cleaning robots are deployed to the space without a systematic plan, cleaning areas may overlap or a cleaning area may not be cleaned at all. At present, a human operator may be needed to assign a cleaning area to the cleaning robots to equally divide the cleaning areas. However, the assignment by the human operator may result in inconvenience and difficulty in providing an immediate response to a changing environment, for example, a space in which a sudden increase in an amount of garbage may occur.